Maschio Consulting

We use the theories and techniques of cultural anthropology to interpret consumer behavior and help develop compelling advertising and business strategies.

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A New/Old Story Culture: Anthropology and the Uses of Virtual Reality for Journalism

Journalists have been fascinated by the potential of virtual reality to strengthen the emotional connection audiences have to the stories journalists create. In an effort to accelerate immersive storytelling in journalism, the Google News Lab commissioned our anthropological study of this medium. We looked at how audiences experience VR, the attractions the medium for audiences, and how journalistic content can be shaped in ways that surface the medium’s strengths. Another arm of Google, Google Zoo, was interested in some of the medium’s commercial potentials. These were some of the concerns that I was hired to address. But as I listened to people’s accounts of the VR experience and as I participated with them in viewing VR content, the study took on a more personal meaning for me. I remembered my time as an anthropologist in New Guinea, listening to myths and stories and seeing them performed in ritual contexts. To my mind VR has some of the characteristics of what anthropologists call oral literature (something of an oxymoron): the stories and myths of non-literate peoples.

In the oral culture of Papua New Guinea, where I worked for some years, stories had little meaning apart from the context of their performance, the ritual events when myths and characters were enacted. In these contexts, the performer of stories participated in their themes and meanings and events, re-enacting them, seemingly seeing through the eyes of the story’s characters, feeling their emotions, as if the teller/performer were living the story. Both VR and the New Guinea oral tradition are quite different from our existing ways of telling and experiencing and understanding stories.

Virtual reality is an emotionalist, experiential medium that allows people to feel that they are living the present moment of a story. There is a decided presentism to the medium. The way we tend to think about storytelling, that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that it unfolds in an orderly sequence, does not seem to apply in this medium. Rather, people are often more interested in exploring the VR world to which they have been transported than in following any particular path, often losing whatever narrative thread VR content creators have tried to fashion. The allure of the medium tends to run counter to the hard-headed, fact-driven storytelling style of journalists, as our study, and the Google News Lab white paper summary of our study discussed. 

Just as interesting to me, and something that the journalists who created in this medium could not articulate, was that this cutting edge visual technology actually evoked older, one could perhaps say more primary or primal forms of experience. The question for journalists then becomes, given this fact, how does one fashion pieces in the medium in ways that leverage its strengths? I was in a position to help answer this question, because I had lived this story before during my fieldwork in New Guinea. You never know when anthropological training and experience will be useful. Virtual reality and 360 journalism are just some of the new technologies that have the potential to transform journalistic storytelling. Anthropological ideas and approaches can help make the new storytelling style more impactful.

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The Changing Culture of Consumer Desire

I’ve worked in business anthropology for close to twenty years and have seen and studied the rise and fall of many consumer trends. In this developing essay, I reflect on how, through these trends, certain basic values of American culture have been continually expressed and altered on the consumer landscape. The essay shows how culture has patterned forms of consumer desire over the past few decades and how consumer desire has attached itself to different products and services, thereby driving culture change. The essay concludes with a discussion of the culture of social media and of how social media’s increasing prominence reveals the desire for new forms of sociality.  

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An anthropological look at cats and the rituals of consumer life

I have been doing a lot of work about the cultural meanings of online behavior. It was inevitable that at some point I would consider, anthropologically, our fascination with cats, a ubiquitous presence online. If the reader can make her way through the first few “theory pages” of this essay, she will find a discussion of the topic of cats, and of the ritual elements that surrounds their care and feeding.  The whole piece considers the ritual and emotional elements of consumer behaviors and the way in which a sense of meaning, and even sacredness and beauty, can be derived from the most ordinary of things and activities.

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What Does a Corporate Anthropologist Think he is Doing?

What does a corporate anthropologist do? Does he have a sense of calling, a viewpoint, a philosophy about what he is doing? Or is he just fulfilling the terms of his contract and hoping to be paid?

If you were to corner a “business anthropologist” in a bar and ask him what he was about and what he did for a living he might say, as the fictional corporate anthropologist U does in Tom McCarthy’s new novel Satin Island, that he “purveys cultural insights” - but what does that mean and does it capture the gist of his work? Do we just, as U says, “unpick the fiber of a culture” (ours) and then let the client in on how they can best get traction on this fiber, so that they can introduce their own strategic embroidery  (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product)”. I feel that this is too cynical an account. It signals a certain anthropological ennui. It implies that we anthropologists would really rather be back in New Guinea taking down myths and scrambling around taro or yam gardens but that we have to convince ourselves that cultural insight is cultural insight no matter where one might find it - whether in a New Guinea taro garden or in a middle class suburban home where a woman may be thinking over her decision to both breast feed and formula feed her infant.

Anthropologists in the "real" field of academic anthropology can be said to be on a mission – to uncover and describe a new myth or ritual system; to analyze that system holistically, powerfully capturing its essence. The business anthropologist seems rather at first glance not so much to be on a mission as to have a job or a contract that he has to fulfill in order to be paid.

Well, it’s really not like that. Like the Blues Brothers of old, I and some (if not all) of the anthropologists I work with are also on a mission. In fact, I have rather a missionary point of view, which is to reveal the powerful human dimension that brands, goods, services, and humans, buying and selling and desiring things express. And in making businesses more aware of those dimensions, to make them more humane and better citizens. Sometimes I can only hope.  I suppose that is the way I would describe my mission. I am both a humanistic anthropologist and a business anthropologist. As far as I am concerned, you can’t be one without being the other and clients who miss this essential point are not being the best business people they can be, no matter how many graphs and pie charts they read and no matter how much big data they pour over.

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Sneaker Culture

Nike Air Jordan I, 1985. Nike Archives (Photo: Ron Wood).

Not far from my house, at the Brooklyn Museum, is an exhibit called “The Rise of Sneaker Culture”. Ken Johnson, who reviewed the exhibit for the New York Times, notes that the problem with “it is it too much focused on the sneakers themselves (color, design elements, type and brand etc) and not enough on sneaker culture”. That is, on the social and cultural meanings consumers have attributed to and created about sneakers during different times. His point struck a chord for me. In the late 90s, at the height of the Michael Jordan sneaker craze, I spent some months doing commercial ethnographic research on sneaker culture, shuttling back and forth between inner city African American and Hispanic neighborhoods and suburban, often predominately white, subdivisions, talking to people about athletic fashion and most especially about their sneakers. I interviewed collectors, sneakerheads who had closets full of sneakers (these could often discuss the relative merits of a particular pair of sneakers the way an oenophile might discuss vintage wines), moms choosing sneaker styles for their toddlers, suburban slackers and skateboarders, pick-up basketball players, extreme and confidence sports enthusiasts, and others,  mostly young men and women. What really came out of the study was an understanding of the way these different groups and types observed, borrowed from, commented on, and in other ways dialogued with and about each other via the medium of athletic fashion and especially sneakers.

This culture dialogue was also a game and a competition; it was a performance. People, working from the same pool of mass merchandise (signature sneaker lines and brands, the uniforms and logos of pro and college sports teams, etc.) worked to tease out unique looks for themselves. My respondents were animated by a powerful desire to purchase the latest shoes and fashions, with these serving as pivotal media for competition, rivalry and display. People were developing ad-hoc fashion rules for mixing and matching brands, colors, logos, which they would then instantly modify. As they played this game they sent messages of gender identity, ethnic identity, race or ethnic relationships, athleticism, the power of celebrity in America, the cultural importance of sport.  For me, an anthropologist, sneaker culture appeared to be American culture writ large, laid out before me, in the commercial realm. This was one of my first projects carried out as a corporate, practicing anthropologist. It convinced me that consumer culture was authentic culture, that powerful culture themes, values, ideas and emotions could power and animate consumer life.  

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The Meaning of Mobile and the Digital Life in Singapore: from Epic to Romance

My studies of the meanings that people attribute to mobile devices, mobile technology bundles, social media platforms, and the new cultures of communication more generally have allowed me to consider sweeping comparative culture themes. For instance, our first commercial studies on this topic, carried out in North America, charted the rise of relational concepts of self and person in the highly individualistic context of western societies and cultures. Other studies have followed the rise of more individualist values and ideas in more communal Asian contexts, such as Singapore, which I will speak of presently.

In the States we argued that Individualism, a sense of individual uniqueness, is increasingly created through relationalism, through relating to others. We see this perhaps most obviously in the new culture of social media where people associate in order to build a sense of self as well as a sense of community. Now people try to build and express individual uniqueness as they relate to and share resources, insights and skills with others. They continually develop their knowledge of things and their individual interests in concert with others and in this social way they can find themselves; increasingly people find their own voices through social media. It is in ways such as these that emerging mobile technologies and social media platforms support what anthropologists would call “relational” self ideals. People are  constantly connected to and connecting with one another via these technologies, sharing opinions, knowledge, trying to reach consensus, sharing news of each others’ lives, forming Facebook and other social media communities. To put things perhaps too baldly, in these spaces, and through these actions, lives and selves become reflections of the lives and selves of others.

Singapore provided a fascinating contrast to this. The self in Singapore was once structured according to rather communal principles. Confucianism for instance stressed self development in the context of familial relationships. Many scholars have argued that there, being a son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, father or mother took precedence over the person’s sense of being an independent person. Continual personal reinvention was never a dominant theme of the culture, as it always was in the United States particularly. Rather, the self ideal taught that the person was first and foremost a social being whose life task was to learn the science and art of adjusting to the world.  This “traditional, somewhat stereotypical view” of Singaporean, and other Asian selfhoods, is about the solidity and depth of ties that bind to family and tradition and to values such as self cultivation, grace in manner, filial piety, self application. However, as we carried out our studies we begin to hear quite a bit about personal, social & psychic mobility, albeit with an Asian accent. We used a specific concept to frame and make sense of this. We used the concept of Romance. Romance is a highly charged concept in world literature encompassing intimate feelings, memories, personal concerns and projects, vulnerable and searching heroes and heroines. Romance is about the daily struggle to find a  degree of happiness, describing how people create and maintain romantic relationships, friendships, family relations and a meaningful relationship with the places in which they live out their lives. As we perused and listened to people talk about their Instagram pictures, their tweets and their lives on social media more generally we found that popular Singaporean culture is increasingly a romantic, feeling culture highlighting intimate everyday adventures and experiences: Love, sentimental attachments to traditional foods, the fun, frivolity and pleasure that is to be discovered in everyday places, events, images and feelings. We found that the digital life in Singapore increasingly conforms to the principles of romance, providing the persistent promise of romance, in the wide sense in which we have described it. It provides a promise of fantasy, play and a degree of mystery.

Our business problem or task was to help our client align advertising imagery, theme and emotionality to the developing romantic ethos. As we did this we contrasted Romance with Epic. Epic accounts of Singapore are monumentalizations of ideas of progress, competitiveness and hard-won collective achievement. For instance the tale that Singapore continually tells about itself of its rise from an impoverished, humble Chinese trading center to one of the four great Asian Tiger economies. This is a tale that stresses tearing down the old and erecting something new, vibrant and fiercely competitive in its place sweeping away sentimental attachments to the past. Epic accounts are about the wisdom of the ruling elite, about communal bootstrapping, and striving. We discussed how epic was weighty and formal, not light, intimate or sentimental, but how Singapore was moving from Epic to Romance. And we endeavored to anchor business strategies within this culture transformation. 

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A Brief Comment on the Culture Meanings of Social Media Platforms, Mobile Phones and the New Culture of Mobility

The smartphone and the various pictorial, and other communication technologies it supports have many dimensions of meaning and use. They are means for the creation and maintenance of social ties and social networks, they can make us more aware of the events and places that surround our lives, and they can anchor us in a social network; or, they can be isolating, as many have pointed out (Turkle, for instance).  They have almost become what the sociologist Marcel Mauss would call total social phenomena, having reached into many if not most arenas of our society, and having many dimensions of meaning: entertainment and play, economic and political, social and familial.

For instance, people have creative objectives in joining, combining and utilizing a variety of social media platforms or channels. Besides trying to cultivate attachment, security, and to source knowledge and resources, people are developing an enhanced sense of individuality as they join social media communities, explore their interests on them and use them as tools.   With a nod to the sociologist George Simmel we might say that as the number of social platforms proliferate the possibilities for people to develop their interests and inner lives increase, expanding the variability of people’s capacities, resulting in a type of social media cosmopolitanism (a relative familiarity with the different topics, people, interests and goals one discovers on social media).Social media platforms are increasingly “materials at hand” that people combine in various inventive ways to further the life project of coming to know and to realize different aspects and capabilities of the self. People do form small “interest” groups or collectives within platforms such as Instagram or Twitter. Some of my respondents referred to these as creative communities, helping each other achieve various objectives, whether artistic/symbolic or practical. These channels appear to be different language games, to reference Wittgenstein. Each has its own language developed by users and enthusiasts. To get the most out of each channel one has to be socialized into it, learning the language and the general contour of the channel and sometimes extending or transforming it.

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The Play Paradigm in the Mobile Life and the Fall of Blackberry

Blackberry was more than simply a commercial brand. It was a powerful culture symbol. It represented an ideal of personhood. In an old report I called this the centerperson ideal. A centerperson being someone who derived energy, satisfaction even a sense of power and presence from being at the center of a web of personal and business relationships that she had created.The Blackberry device contained a technology bundle that enabled the extension of the centerperson’s presence and influence into the world of work and achievement. There has been a shift in the Zeitgeist of mobile. The centerperson paradigm is out and the play paradigm is in. It seems that when people use mobile devices today they favor technology bundles, apps etc that are made for play Iphone and Android Mobile device use is characterized by the sense that one is playing with a toy.  

For instance, the apps craze, adding application upon application to one’s smart phone, is a type of world building, for the purpose of emotional transport.  It’s worth noting that video, music and game apps are the most popular.  These are play applications that promote reverie, escape and mood lightening.  These and other applications that one finds on smartphones and tablets speak to the player’s objective of surrounding the self with a beguiling world of amusement and play. The world of Instagram and Snapchat  Brushes, Helios, iBird Explorer, Slacker, Hipstamatic, Spotify,  Shazam and Pandora is not the world of the Blackberry. This is not to say that the present mobile age is trivial in comparision to the era of Blackberry. After all, the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga told us long ago that play can be a serious undertaking for people and for culture, writing that law, commerce, profit, craft and art were originally “cooked in the primeval soil of play.”  Certainly new cultural and social forms are being created by the new mobile technologies. Texting, photo sharing, streaming video and other content are leading to new ways of being in the world, new ways of finding meaning, value and pleasure in life as i have written elsewhere and have been exploring in my consulting work. Why the paradigm shift is a question to be considered another day. But the idea of brands, whether mobile or otherwise, speaking to the times or not is ever relevant to the student of consumer culture.

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Cars, Social Media, Apps, Mobility and Vitality: the Changing Zeitgeist

The desire for vitality, for energy and for mobility (social mobility and also the desire to be in motion, to be in the moment, to be open to life’s possibilities) the desire to keep going, and not only to keep going but, invoking the American fascination with automobiles, to go with power steering, power brakes and advanced suspension systems that protect you from the experience of “feeling the road”; what do these desires represent to Americans? Often it seems, as Baudrillard once remarked, that to move and to move with style and fluidity were the “only truly profound American pleasures”. The automobile was of course once the obvious place to find this desire to just keep going; American car culture always said something profound about archetypal American values – the values of physicality, of athletic movement and the value of the vitality that this movement represented. Automotive brands were most successful when they expressed values, when they captured an understanding of athletic grace, power and movement, and filled an empty metal space (a car) with the meaning of these values. In an age of traffic jams, road rage, concerns with global warming and CO2 emissions, pedestrian deaths and intense conflict between drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists the American romance with cars now appears quaint at best and destructive on a number of levels at worst. It resonates more with the Madmen era then the era of social media and smartphones. I invoke this comparison because it portends a change in the American Uber values of mobility and vitality and in the range of products and services that these values now attach to. Indeed we now see the value of vitality in the consumer fascination with smartphones, tablets and other of our mobile devices and, more generally, in the new culture of mobile life, mobile applications and social media.

Vitality and mobility have always been linked in the American imagination with discovery. Being vital and in motion means being open to life’s possibilities, perhaps by meeting someone new and interesting, or by discovering a new and engaging place or thing; by learning something new and engaging. Social discovery apps such as Highlight or Sonar are new expressions of this desire. And, through social media platforms such as Instagram and Flickr we discover the visual meanings of places, events and moments. Twitter gives expression to the desire for current knowledge - whether personal/social or geo-political. Pinterest gives expression to the desire for homespun craft. Applications such as Nikewomen Training Club, Brushes, Helios, iBird Explorer, Slacker, Hipstamatic, Urban Spoon, Star Walk, Redlaser, etc., give evidence of the strong desire for play and mood lightening. As the number of social platforms and applications proliferate the possibility for people to develop their interests and inner lives appears to increase; expanding the variability of people’s capacities, resulting in a type of social media cosmopolitanism (a relative familiarity with the different topics, people, interests and goals one discovers and explores on the broad range of social media platforms). People are really developing an enhanced sense of their own capacities and potential as they join social media communities, explore their interests on them and use them as tools.  Put somewhat differently, through these different sites –their communities, codes, languages and sensibilities - people can cultivate different aspects of themselves – a craft aspect, an aesthetic artistic  aspect, an intellectual aspect. The restless self making and remaking (traditional great American pastimes) we see taking place on social media platforms is also a species of vitality, of American vitalism.

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When Anthropology Goes Viral

I recently did an anthropological study of mothers and of parenting. In the study we considered breast and formula feeding, the politics that surround these activities, the feelings, hurts and injuries, the pure human anger and joy that we encountered and were confronted with as we carried out our fieldwork. The study helped inspire a viral commercial for the brand Similac. We provide links to the talk and the commercial here. The talk is a reflection piece on the culture of motherhood and breast and formula feeding in contemporary America. It is also an illustration of how anthropology is used by businesses and of how business anthropologists themselves define, understand the meaning of business anthropology.

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Visual Storytelling in the Digital Space

Tom Maschio discusses a recent collaboration with Google at the AnthroTech Meetup (NYC, 9/23/13).

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Hello World

Maschio Consulting uses the theories and techniques of cultural anthropology to interpret consumer behavior and help develop compelling advertising and business strategies.